Relatively Prime, Series 2!

My friend Sam is the world's foremost mathematical podcaster. He's done math news shows, math chat shows, mathematician interview shows, a show about cult movies that might not have all that much math in it really, and perhaps most notably a lovely and lively series of math radio documentaries called RELATIVELY PRIME.

Well, it turns out that Samuel wants to do more math podcasting. Sam is a math guy in a much bigger way than he's a video guy, but I'm a video guy, so he asked me to shoot his kickstarter video. I did want to help him, but what I didn't want to do was go to Wisconsin, so we made a cartoon instead.

Sam says he likes this video and I hope everyone else on the internet does too, so that he can raise all that money he needs. You can help him out by visiting his kickstarter today. And everyday.

#2,073: The Unbelievers

American Psycho - ★★★☆☆
I hadn't seen this for at least a decade. I'm not sure there's a lot more to it than I remembered, or than people love to write about on their blogs every now and then. Christian Bale has excellent elocution. His diction and intonation are what I suspect people really like about this movie, if all people who like things about this movie are me.

Lilo & Stitch - ★★★★★
Man, this is just great. The way some people feel about Glengarry Glen Ross and The Aviator, I think I could go on about Lilo & Stitch. Lots of great lines and moments. A sense of things going on outside of the frame. A little darker or odder than I think you'd think a potential 'Disney Classic' might be. I missed this movie.

Justice League: The New Frontier - ★★½☆☆
Watched on the suggestion of a friend who considers this (and the books it's based on) to be the definitive version of the JLA. While it is a really solid take on the origin of the team and some of its members, it's still yet another origin story, and one I'm tired of hearing.

The Unbelievers - ★★☆☆☆
I see what the subjects of this movie are trying to say, but I don't see what this movie is trying to say. The movie doesn't make a case for atheism; if anything, it makes a case that Krauss and Dawkins need a vacation. I thought we might be getting a LET AMERICA LAUGH type doc, showing them dealing with people they met on tour, but it's not that. It's more like a video yearbook of the fact that there was a tour; a sales pitch video for their speaking agents to use.

Don't miss the credits, which contain a trailer's worth of footage from a more interesting documentary.

MPU Live: Taking Obsequiousness to New Unplumbed Depths

I'm ever-so-briefly mentioned in this month's Mac Power Users Live with two tips on presentations.

The first, as covered in my Nintendo e3 post, is to remind you turn off your system noises and so forth before a presentation.

The second, as a stand-up, I encourage you to take a pause instead of um-ing and ah-ing on stage. A brief pause is always shorter than you think it is, and almost always looks deliberate.

Media Monday

- Hoplite - ★★★★☆
Technically, I have won this game, but there's a lot of challenges and achievements and stuff so it doesn't feel beaten. It will live on in my iPad. I'm pretty sure this isn't "roguelike." Which is good. For me.

- Star Wars: Cantina - ★★☆☆☆
I've been cleaning out my phone, cluttered with unused and unloved apps. This was a little diner dash-type game with Star Wars-themed patrons. The whole thing's like half an hour long, and hasn't yet been updated for iOS 6. Anyway, it's been deleted now.

- Tomb Raider - ★★★★☆
My first Tomb Raider game ever, thanks to PS+. This one is basically Uncharted. Often I have this joke (or not-joke) where I feel like maybe I'm not the good guy in a game where I'm slaughtering a film crew's worth of people, but Lara seemed like a total maniac in this thing. If you play it for stealth, she's killing possibly helpful people without ever talking to them, but since she appeared to me as a bloodthirsty monster, and maybe an unreliable narrator, I took no opportunity for stealth. 87% collection.

#2,071: Justice League: Doom

The Conversation - ★★★½☆
A character study of a man eavesdropping on a Hitchcock film. Another movie I appreciate more now than I used to.

Do the Right Thing - ★★★☆☆
I watched this because it was a million degrees in my apartment and I was feeling freaked out about what's going on in Missouri and I wanted it to help. I think maybe it did, but not for the reasons I was expecting.

The Long Goodbye - ★★★½☆
I like a movie whose world has things that are true and universally accepted, even if those things are not necessarily true in our world. It doesn't create a sense of realism, exactly, but it makes their world seem more complete. Brothers Bloom did that well. This movie does it well. I liked this movie.

Nymph()maniac - Vol. 1: ★★★☆☆ - Vol. 2: ★★½☆☆
I haven't seen all or even most of Lars Von Trier's movies, but based on what I have seen, this was lighter and funnier than I was expecting. Volume 2 is a littler drearier. Like Kill Bill, you get most of your fun in volume 1, then volume 2 is just talk talk talk, comment on the inevitable nature of man, et cetera et cetera.

Justice League: Doom - ★★★★☆
DC beats Marvel by a long shot when it comes to direct-to-dvd / OVA type releases. Even the bad ones are generally higher quality than the Marvel releases, and this was a good one. It's a much smaller, easier-to-digest story than say, Superman: Doomsday, which did a great job with the first half, and then tried to cram 50-some comics into the last half hour.

I think DC has a tougher time explaining their characters solo books with the JLA / team books – like, it doesn't seem as though the shadowy urban legend-type Batman would also hang out in space or coach the JLI, and so their solution is to just ignore it. Batman can be and is everything for everyone at some point. The Batman in this story comes off a bit like a grumpy teen, but at least I could imagine him existing in both spheres. Between that and the illustrated difference in power levels on the JLA, the characterization was nicely handled here.